June 2004 Journal

6-1-04 I'll mention two things here at the beginning of this month, then I'll shut up about them, I will be teaching a plants-to-paper workshop here in Berea in August. We will begin by going to the fields and harvesting and go through the process until we have paper. The workshop is geared toward those who have never made paper from plants, but it should be applicable to anyone who enjoys working with weeds. Also, the book that I pulled swatches for last summer and wrote over the winter was released to the public today. More information on it can be found here. Enough. Time for papermaking. **I've finally found time to cook up the willow skins that Judy Zugish sent from Washington. These are strips of willow bast/bark stripped from withes she uses in basketmaking. I tried "ruffling" the skins to loosen and remove some of the bark in the manner that I do the strips from small mulberry limbs, but the bark doesn't flake off. That really didn't matter, because I wanted to try pulp from the bast/bark combination anyway. Some other time I'll try removing the bark by soaking, then scraping the strips before cooking to see if that works. But for now, the bark/bast combination is on cooking. I have an email in to Judy now to ask the botanical name for this willow. (Later....) Good thing I only cooked up a little of the willow skins for two reasons. First, unlike mulberry bark, which makes nice flakes in the pulp, the willow bark cooks into a nasty, dark mush, something I definitely don't want in paper. But second and more importantly, it seems this bast isn't blender material. The individual fine cat hair like fibers are more than an inch long and the wrapped around the blender blades making a hard knot. I raked the bark mush off some of the cooked bast strips and it's lovely stuff, definitely worth pursuing. And I have quite enough of the uncooked material to cook another batch for the beater, but I'll have to find some way of getting rid of the bark first. Not sure what I'll do with the batch I cooked up today...perhaps put it in a wire colander and hit it hard with spray from the hose to see if that will wash the bark out but still leave the bast.

6-2-04 I fooled around a little with the cooked willow bast, but didn't have much luck removing the bark pieces. Placing it in a wire screen container and spraying it with the hose would work, but it wastes too much water. Then I placed it in a bucket and added water, hoping either the bast or the bark would float and the other would sink. No such luck. Susan Ernst suggested soaking the strips until the bark came lose. I may try that or I may try streaming or boiling the strips long enough to loosen the bark. Whatever is done, it has to be done before the bast is cut into pieces. **Early this spring I cleaned out my iris beds and saved the weathered, over-wintered leaves. Cooked and beat these this afternoon. Because of the mold and mildew, the iris leaf pulp is a yucky gray, but I knew it would be and it is exactly what I wanted. Some time ago I did a wasp nest, but I did it out of Siberian iris leaf pulp, which was a tan, not exactly the right color. I want to try a baldfaced hornet's nest and I want it to be a reasonably accurate color. The iris leaf pulp will dry to a weathered gray and should be perfect.

6-3-04 I could do the hornet's nest over a balloon...except I hate balloons with a passion. This must be something that dates back to childhood, but I'm on edge the whole time I'm around them. Instead, I opted to weave a frame on which to build the nest. This is a hastily thrown together oval made from #1 round reed. I hesitate to call it a random weave pattern, because it really isn't, but that's the closest description that I can come up with. A true random weave is anything but random and makes a lovely basket. But I'm not looking for beauty. The frame will be totally covered with paper. All I want is functionality, a base on which I can form the nest. The only thing that really concerns me is that this isn't a very solid form because it's not tightly woven as a basket would be. Whatever. I'll take a stab at covering it with some type of base paper tomorrow afternoon and if I have trouble, I can always add more weavers to tighten it up.

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6-4-04 Hindsight is so clear. If someone could only invent glasses.... Things would have gone a good deal smoother if I'd woven the frame around the stick I chose to use to mount the nest, but I didn't think of that while I was weaving. I wanted the limb and branches to extend through the nest and come out the other side naturally. I was able to collapse the branches and insert them into the woven form with a little squirming. As it turns out, it was fortunate that the form wasn't rigid. I was able to shift a few weavers and place the branch through it just like I wanted. I've opted to use tissue paper as the base on this, mainly because I have it and tissue molds to any surface instantly when spray dampened. I laid dry tissue on one side of the form, sprayed it with slightly thinned cooked Argo Gloss Laundry Starch, then patted gently and the tissue adhered nicely. The other half of the frame covered just as easily. I let both sides dry well, then painted it with full strength cooked starch and added a few patches in places I missed. While I was still wet, I poked a hole for the hornet's entrance. The entrance to most nests I've seen isn't directly at the bottom, but slightly up on one of the sides and I positioned this one on the front and slightly left of center. (As an aside, this type form, properly woven, would make a lovely lamp!) Tomorrow I'll pull sheets of iris paper and begin covering the nest. The one thing that concerns me is the color variations that occur in hornets' nests. They're not a solid gray. Rather they are varying shades of gray that occur in lines as the nest is built. I'm assuming that a single hornet works in a specific area, forming a line along the edge of the sheet. I'm also assuming that he gets his wood pulp from a single source. Later he changes sources or another hornet takes over work in that area and the color of the paper is slightly different. There's no way I can duplicate that. I'll have to depend on irregularities to simulate the changes in colors. We'll see.

6-5-04 The weathered iris pulp pulls beautifully. Still, it's nice not to have to worry about whether the sheets are perfectly even in thickness with perfect edges. Rather than pull a bunch of sheet, I only pulled six to get started with and to see how it was going to work. (It cooperated perfectly, so there was no need to mix anything with the pulp.) I started at the top with small pieces of the wet iris sheets and worked my way down, using larger pieces as I reached the less curved areas. Each sheet was swabbed on the back with undiluted cooked starch before being placed on the form. I found very quickly that even the deckled edges were too "sharp" or blunt, so I pulled the edges off to feather them. After each piece was added, I touched the edges up with a finger dipped in starch and smoothed them onto the surface. This is the nest fully covered with the first coat of iris paper. (The lower half of the next is still wet in this picture.) As the nest stands, it is too smooth. It needs irregularities -- loose edges, even torn and dangling bits of paper -- to make it more realistic. The entrance hole needs some work, too. Right now it's too wide open. It needs to be closed down slightly and a loose edge of paper formed around it. Doing anything more, though, will have to wait until the nest is dry.

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6-6-04 I was surprised this morning that the bottom of the nest, particularly the entrance, was still wet. The hair dryer took care of that quickly enough. After it was dry, I reinforced the area around each limb, adding additional iris paper swabbed on the back with the starch, then I worked on filling the entrance with a narrow roll of paper. At this point, the nest has about 20 sheets of 5.5" x 8.5" iris paper in it. I think it will take about that many more to finish it up, but I only pulled 14 more to use this afternoon after the nest dries. The paper holds well if placed in a plastic bag, but I'd rather work with fresh sheets. There was only time today to do the first few rounds of irregularities, but I think it's going to work. This is a poor shot, but I needed the shadows to show the raised edges of the paper, and if I used the flash, they burned out in the light and didn't show. I think this technique is going to work to replace the color variations, but I'm uncertain how much of it to use on this second layer and how much of the first layer to leave exposed. It's so hard to judge, partly because I'm working on the bottom of the nest while it's on the desk instead of hanging, and partly because the paper is darker while wet. I may have to let this dry until tomorrow, then make a judgment call then. I'll have to be careful not to be too regular in adding these. Hornets' nests have swirls in the texture that I'll need to duplicate.

6-7-04 I ran upon a problem. Hanging the piece and working on it was impossible. If it's hanging where I can reach whatever point I want, it was basically unsupported except from the top, so it would swing like mad. I only have two hands and I needed both of those for the paper pieces, leaving none to steady the nest. The only choice was to place the nest on the work table and cover three sides with the wet iris paper, working from the bottom up, then figure out how to deal with the backside when the time comes. (Can't help but wonder if I'm painting myself into a corner by doing it this way.) This morning I covered part of it and reworked the entrance hole, then left the nest to dry while I worked out. ("Worked out..." Sounds so very....yuppish. I'm not. Just out of shape after a long winter.) When I came back, I was faced with working on the backside, the corner I'd painted myself into. As it turns out, the bottom of the branch on which the nest is built fit perfectly into the base of my adjustable lamp. Of course, that left me without the lamp, but small sacrifice. I now had a stable surface to work on. Blending the ends of the wet paper into the pieces that were already dry was easy enough. I feathered the wet ends, touched them with starch, then brushed starch on the dried ends and smoothed them together. It's virtually seamless. I left three or four joints unattached, rolled the paper ends outward and left them to hang loose, simulating the pieces that peel off hornets' nests. I'm well satisfied with the finished nest. (The last two pictures have been color corrected and come closer to the actual color of the nest than the other shots.) It actually turned out far more realistic than I had hoped. But I can't take credit for all of it. Mother Nature is an excellent designer engineer. Life is good.

For anyone in the Louisville, KY/Jeffersonville, IN area, I will be doing at demo at Bob Hill's Hidden Hill Nursery in Utica, IN, on Saturday, June 12th, from 1 until 7 and Sunday, June 13th, from 1 until 5. The Hidden Hill Nursery website has additional information and directions.

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6-12&13-04 The demo at Hidden Hill proved interesting, to say the least. It rained (but doesn't it always rain on outdoor events that involve artisans?). Fortunately, Bob and Janet Hill had pity on me. They arranged to set up the papermaking inside one of the sheds that house the shop/gallery. (Other artisans were set up outside, but they had their own tents. I'm tentless and at the mercy of rain unless other provision is made.) And rain or no rain, the people came. In order to interest people in papermaking, I do a hands-on demo, allowing them to pull their own paper to take home. And with the rain, there were plenty of people in there with me, pulling away. Lots of activity, lots of fun. I really suspect, though, that more people came to see Hidden Hill than came because of the demos. Aside from the variety of native and exotic plants, it's a fascinating place. Ever see a pink bathtub in the middle of a garden? There is at Hidden Hill. Or how about a door in the middle of nowhere? It opens. It closes. Yes, you could walk around the door...but you don't. You walk through it to the other side, carefully closing it after you. Bob Hill is warped, delightfully so, but warped nonetheless. He even has his own hill, a 4.5' pile of dirt named...what else...Bob Hill. The things to see aren't all strange or humorous. There are fountains and all manner of artwork, such as this copper tree, scattered throughout the nursery landscape. If this all sounds like a plug for Hidden Hill, perhaps it is, but I found the place absolutely fascinating. Every nook and cranny held something else of interest, sometimes small, sometimes large. It's definitely a place to visit, if only for the fun of seeing it.

6-17-04 A number of years ago, I put up a random weave basket underneath the eaves on the back deck, hoping one of the neighborhood birds would nest in it. I thought robins, especially, would be attracted to it. No such luck. Apparently, they don't think much of my idea of a nesting site. However, paper wasps weren't as particular, and a couple of years ago they built inside of the basket. I had so much fun creating the balfaced hornets' nest, I thought I would try to duplicate this one. It's considerably smaller and somewhat flatter, but the concept is the same. Today I started with a random weave form and covered it with tissue to form a base. Rather than building this one around a limb, as I did the hornets' nest, this will be attached by a paper covered wire directly to a small branch. Tomorrow, after this is dry, it will get a base coat of of the weathered bearded iris paper.

6-19-04 I put a base coat of the iris paper on yesterday and dried it under a lamp, but some overgrown flowerbeds got in the way of doing anything else with it then. That picture was taken while the iris were in full bloom, but that's over and done, so it was time for digging up and thinning. I clipped the tops and set them to dry on the deck for later papermaking. Today I finished covering the nest. The entrance hole is on the bottom and slightly toward the front. I added several layers of paper to extend that part so the shape of the whole nest would not be perfectly oval or round. I was concerned about the visible ridges formed by the underlying framework, but as it turns out, that wasn't a problem. The next layer of paper with its raised ridges camouflaged these. I want to mount the nest onto a small limb (which I haven't found yet), but I'm at a loss as to how to mount or secure the limb. My thought right now is to affix the limb to some kind of block (wood? clay?) so that the nest can be displayed on a flat surface such as a table, but I'm not locked into this idea.

6-20-04 Found the perfect limb this morning up near the compost heap. It's a small pine branch, about 18" long and maybe a foot across at the widest spread of its twigs. I know most of the trees that grow around here, but pines have never been a part of my life until we moved here. I've just never taken the time to learn them. From the book, this appears to be a yellow or shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata), though I wouldn't swear to it. Doesn't really matter. What does matter is that the limb is delightfully diseased with the bark forming odd twisting furrows. The shape of the branch solved my display problem. With no protruding twigs on the back side, it lies flat and will work perfectly with the next as a wall hanging rather than a desk piece.

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6-22-04 It's next to impossible to get a decent shot of the finished nest. This is the best I could do for a full shot of the branch with the mounted nest. The close up isn't much better. I'm sure a different color background would have helped.. *I started working on something new this morning, but have absolutely no idea where I'm going with the idea. It's an outgrowth of four things -- a weird, bumpy cocoon piece executed by one of the clay artisans exhibiting at Hidden Hill, the lamps done by the Japanese artisan, the layering technique I used to form the hornets' nest and the fact that I found a stash of various souring, but still usable, pulps in the back of the refrigerator. Okay...ideas come packaged in mixed bags like that sometimes. That's not to say that anything useable or useful will come out of this bit of whimsy, but I'm having fun with it. Initially, I thought to take a heavy black plastic leaf bag, put water in it and tie it off at various places, then cover it with paper. Tossed that idea almost immediately. The amount of water needed would have been more than I wanted to deal with, particularly if the bag were to leak. Besides, water was too fluid (no pun intended). It wouldn't stay put. So, what is lighter than water, drier than water and will stay in one place reasonably well? Styrofoam peanuts. And I had those in abundance, thanks to some very zealous packing in a box sent by Peter Hopkins. The heavy duty bag wasn't needed, so the peanuts were shifted to a tall kitchen garbage bag. I opted for the most stable tied form, simply wrapping yarn around the bag three times forming a sort of pumpkin-like shape. The peanuts allowed indentations nicely and they're bumpy enough to make the surface interesting. The colors of the refrigerator pulps ranged from deep rust to brown to cream to gray. I spent part of the morning pulling sheets from each, then mixing in some of the underprocessed torch ginger and daylily leaf pulps to give a broad range of colors and visual textures. All of the sheets were foot pressed between boards to expel the water, but never run through the mechanical press. I don't know what this is going to be, so I don't know whether I began working on the top or the bottom, but this is the way it looks as of this evening. To get to this point, I tore uneven pieces from the wet sheets, slathered the underneath side of them with double concentrated cooked laundry starch and stuck them on the plastic, with each piece slightly overlapping the previous one. I'm sure I've missed places, but they can be touched up later. After I finished for the evening, I brushed a layer of starch over the surface of the paper. In theory, tomorrow morning it will be dry so I can flip the piece and work on the top...or bottom...whichever it turns out to be. FWIW, the colors of the paper aren't as vivid as in the picture. For some reason, light seems to heighten the color of any wet surface.

6-24-04 Yesterday I finished covering the plastic bag and ended up with this (keys there for size reference). The top half of the piece is darker because it was still wet. After it was dry, I cut off the bag tie, dumped the peanuts and pulled the plastic bag out. The shape is surprisingly solid, or maybe not surprisingly. The starch did its work well. There were a few small holes, but not as many as I had expected. Whatever this piece is, it definitely calls out to be lit from the inside. Jan Moulder has kindly offered information about a source for fixtures. After the catalog comes, I'll decide whether this is going to be a table piece or hanging unit. Either way will require a mounting surface made from wood, but the shape and form of that will have to be determined later. Just for the heck of it, I hung the piece on the 5 watt bathroom nightlight and shot a picture. There are three or four thin places on the piece (one is visible in the backlit picture) that will have to be to re-covered, not because of weakness, but because they allow too much light through. These aren't actually holes, but are sheets with very thin layers of fiber between the heavier inclusions. But patching is no trouble. Just paint starch on a wet sheet of the same paper, stick it on, then brush starch over the patch. Instant fix.

6-26-04 A few weeks ago I was trimming the hedge and found that a bird had built in top of the bushes. I trimmed around the nest, but she never came back, so I finally removed the nest and finished trimming. A few days later, a robin's nest blew out of one of our trees, and I hauled that back to the deck, too. Both nests have been sitting there ever since. Why? Because I'm a compulsive keeper of things from nature. But what has this to do with paper? Well...the more I looked at the robin's nest, the more I began to wonder if it could be made into paper. It was full of weathered hosta leaf stems and grasses. The other nest was more grass stems and tiny twigs, but even it looked possible. The biggest problem, at least at that moment, seemed to be all the dirt that was gluing the robin's nest together. When I soaked it to dissolve and remove the mud, I discovered...um, a few more problems. Robins aren't particularly picky when it comes to building materials. In addition to the hosta leaf stems and grasses, I found - two kinds of string, two or three well frayed cigarette butts, strips of plastic, some kind of white foam, a piece of frayed blue polyester material, assorted rotted non-fibrous leaves (i.e. maple, ash), a chunk of what appeared to be cornstalk, one 3" very stiff white hair (presumably from a dog), bits of paper from soda drink cup, 3 tiny balls of Styrofoam and a small hunk of pink insulation - all glued together with more mud than you would believe. Oh, yes, throw in a few small rocks, too. I picked out and tossed the non-cellulose material and washed the mud off what was left. The other bird nest was clean, nothing but grass, grass stems and some tiny twig like materials. Those two birds had totally different approaches to home building. I knew the hosta would make a solid base for the paper, but given the differences in the cooking times for the materials, I didn't hold out much hope for the quality of the sheets. Still, I was curious. I cooked the nest material for 2 hours in soda ash, then processed with a blender. I am really surprised at the paper. The hosta and grass stems made a solid base for the sheet and the rest of the materials processed fine enough so that the sheets are smooth and could even be run through a printer. The color of the bird nest paper is a lovely soft gray and the sheets are surprisingly strong.

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